How To Tell If Your Website Needs an SEO Audit

Unfortunately, you can’t just create a website and leave it to do its thing. Websites need active monitoring and updating if they’re to continue attracting visitors.

A search engine optimisation (SEO) audit will tell you how to improve your website so that search engines rank it as high as possible when people search for businesses or services like yours. Because of the fluid nature of the online landscape, most websites need periodic SEO audits.

Here are a few things that should tip you off when your website needs an SEO audit.

Your website is fairly old

If your website was built a few years ago, it might have been created using methods that are now out-dated.

Also, some websites are built on platforms that need constant updating. It’s worth finding out if your website needs a crucial update.

Your website is new or has been redesigned

Web designers often don’t take all possible SEO factors into account when building a new website.

It’s best practice to do a full SEO audit immediately after a new website has been launched.

Very little of your traffic is coming from search engines

For most websites, organic search engine traffic makes up a significant percentage of overall traffic. If this isn’t the case for your site, it could do with an audit.

Your site doesn’t rank well in a search for your brand name

If you do a Google search for your unique company or brand name and your website isn’t among the top search results that are returned, the site is due for an audit.

Your visitor count is dropping

If fewer people are visiting your website, it could be because they’re no longer finding your site among the top results for their searches. It could also be because your website is too slow to load.

Conversions are declining

Ideally, you want visitors to your site to “convert” – that is, to perform an action, such as buying what you’re selling or signing up for a newsletter. If they aren’t, it could mean that opportunities to convert aren’t obvious enough on your site.

It might also indicate that you’re not attracting your real target market to the site. For example, your site might rank high for certain searches – but are they the right searches, given what you’re offering?

User feedback is negative

If the feedback coming from visitors includes complaints of slow loading times, buggy interfaces or hard to find information, an audit is in order.

You’ve never had an SEO audit done

At Gnu World, we’ve done countless SEO audits. To date, every one of those audits has revealed at least some areas for improvement. If you’ve never had an SEO audit done for your website, we can almost guarantee that an audit will identify a range of different SEO issues.

What can affect your SEO ranking?

The list of factors that can affect a site’s performance in search engines is long.

For example, it includes content-related issues, such as content length, keyword optimisation within site content and whether your site includes duplicate content.

It includes accessibility issues, such as how well your site’s architecture has been defined, how well site navigation is structured and whether web pages include broken links.

Technical issues such as site speed, support for mobile devices and errors and inconsistencies in code can also have a major impact on how search engines rank your site.

Once an audit has revealed relevant issues with your site, the process of fixing them can start.

At Gnu World, we specialise in digital marketing. Proper SEO is a necessary building block for the success of any website, so we offer this to all our clients. Contact us to discuss your digital marketing needs or to enquire about an SEO audit.